Road Layout Tutorial and Inspiration - Traffic Fix

everybody welcome back to yumbo tv i'm yumbl and today i have a situation to discuss with you um imagine a city it's been growing it's it's got more and more population 10 000 20 000 maybe maybe around 25 thousand to thirty thousand it starts seeing problems um you start to see traffic backups and your services can't get through and people start leaving and the property value drops and the city kind of collapses is this familiar i bet it is if you've ever played city skylines um you've probably noticed that around the 20 000 to 30 000 population mark the traffic can break down and your city can break down along with it today i really want to talk to you about effective use of road layouts and road hierarchy to avoid that scenario happening in your city i'd like to welcome all of you to a map called dendrome lz beautifully built map you can find it in the steam workshop but it's not really about the map it's about this highway layout that we start with so road hierarchy i would start at the top the the highest traffic flow for vehicles is found on the highways seems pretty obvious right and look the highway is connected to itself via these trumpet interchanges so this is how you connect a highway to another highway here's another highway coming into almost a 90 degree angle hitting this main kind of beltway loop that they've given us and connecting to it here's the beginning of the beltway loop coming around so these are what's called system interchanges which is when the highway system is connected to another part of the highway system what you want to start your map with generally is actually a service interchange now a service interchange is is more like typically it's either an overpass or an underpass that intersects the highway you'll see that what they've given us here and what most maps start with is a system interchange which means that they want you to bring the highway into your city which isn't really necessary and and can have some mixed results or um i don't think that it's good to start a map with the mentality that this is the right way to start it that's usually what the game gives you that's what most map makers give you but this means that i'm going to take a highway and bring it into the city somewhere and like where's it going to go i don't know it could come across and connect here i think that what we have here is this beautiful beltway system and i think that we'd be better off doing what's called a service interchange and i'll show you exactly what that looks like so now i've removed that intersection that starting intersection that the mac the map maker gave us and i'd actually like to start with what's called a service interchange instead of that would be system interchange remember how i said it's the the type of interchange that connects a highway to itself i don't think that that's the best way to start a city and i think that it sets a lot of people up for failure or or even if you're just starting an area of your city you know this doesn't have to be how you start the entire thing but i would recommend starting sections of your city just like this i just want to put this one back so the way that you you do this of course the way that you connect a service interchange into your existing highway network you can build it yourself i've already built a couple so i'm just going to insert one of mine this is called a partial cloverleaf you can find it in the in the workshop i've also done videos about how to create this yourself so check out my interchange videos for more information and if you line it up just right there's a chance that it'll work hey there we go so i'm going to call that good and we're actually going to delete a little bit here just to connect this a little bit more effectively so what we've just done if you look at this fundamentally connect that connect this turn this backwards okay so we've replaced that that would be highway connection what we what we had there was a highway to highway connection now we actually have a highway to city connection okay so that's the difference this has uh this type of intersection or this type of interchange has a higher uh it's how you get on and off the highway effectively it's an exit ramp that previous interchange was the way you connect the highway to itself this one is how you connect the highway to the rest of your city so it's it's a bit different in concept and i don't think most places talk about this properly in my opinion so that's kind of kind of why i wanted to go over this a little bit now the stock version of this that i made has a four lane road i want to use a six lane road for this just because it'll be a little bit a little bit better and to start our road network we want to start with an arterial road which is where it is where the uh the artery of the city so imagine think of a circulatory system the artery is the place is the part of the circular circulatory system that moves the highest volume of of um blood effectively and that's why it's called an arterial road so it's got to be a big six-lane road or a big four-lane road it should be big it should be effective and you should think in terms of volume so we've gone from the highway down to the arterial road is a good first step and then from the arterial we want to go down to our uh actually let's continue our arterial system here we're just i'm just going to go east with this east in my mind the map goes this way so i'm just gonna go in a couple different directions here and we'll see what you know we'll see what comes to this and let's do the same sort of thing over here just for imagination's sake i stopped right before that thing on purpose and let's say this one continues on 135 degrees so we'll split the difference and go out that way and we'll kind of go around the lake here so now we've begun building out our arterial system i'm going to explore this a little bit further for just a moment so here we are so far so good this is our arterial road system um the hallmark of the arterial road system is we're doing a six-lane road it should either be four or six or eight lanes most of the time and this is secondary to the highway so we're coming down from the highway with a service interchange and we are essentially doing minimal intersections for these minimal i've even been a little heavy-handed some of this could probably be considered the next type of road which is collector road but this is we'll call it arterial this is all six lane road some things that i was conscious of is coming off the highway i wanted to make sure that there wasn't too much going on so instead of a four-way intersection here we've done a roundabout which is an okay thing to do you should never do it on the highway but you can do these on arterials you can do these for traffic coming on and off the highway another thing to keep in mind is that we've we've made alternate ways to cross the highway so we've got one two three four different ways to cross the highway only one of which and not even necessarily the most attractive is the interchange that we've built so the interchange we don't we don't want the majority of the traffic using this to be going across to get to the other area i'd much rather see like this area you can see there's going to be a lot built over here at some point probably i'd rather they use this one or this one and just stay away from this one entirely and this one if if we were to build like a an industrial area over here which is kind of what i'd foresee i wanted a way for them to get to this other area of the city without having to use the the interchange overpass so we've gone from highway down to arterial the next set of roads that we're going to do is the collector roads give me just a moment to to whip that up all right now we're getting somewhere so check it out we've still got our our main arterial road layout nothing's changed there i didn't make any adjustments but i added these collector roads and these roads let's let's take this section for instance you can see all the four lane roads with the trees down the middle those are the collector roads and they look consistent throughout the whole thing i've used six lane standard vanilla six lane road and standard vanilla four lane road with trees in the middle just so you can see the difference and this road is where our local roads will plug in to get to the arterial now in a good road network this is called road hierarchy we are trying to start from the smallest road and go up to the biggest road or start from the biggest road and go down to the smallest road effectively without having any bottlenecks in between you'll notice without intersecting the arterial too many times is the goal you don't want too many intersections close together at this point but we're right where we want to be so we've kind of filled in this used to be one big six lane block and this used to be kind of a big six lane rectangle and now we've we've split it with roads that we can connect smaller roads to and you'll notice i i really want people to only cross over using the arterial roads i don't want to have just a bunch of bridges along here because that's kind of not that realistic looking and not that good looking the you know for every rule there's a million ways to break it but if you have a thousand bridges over your highway it doesn't look that good in my opinion in that case you could use an elevated highway which i've done in some of my cities and you can really go to town with connecting the grid under it but that's not what we're doing here so you can see up here i've left some dead ends in certain areas with the expectation that these will fill out using our local roads which are going to be smaller roads probably two lane roads you'll see that come together in the next moment here so now it looks like we've got something here is our full road system uh complete with local roads that you can see the small the small two-lane roads with parking on the sides that's just the basic vanilla road that is where the houses and businesses not as a rule but that's generally where the houses will get zoned so you can see once again we're going on the highway we get off the highway at this interchange here the arterial roads distribute to the collector roads and as a rule all of the collector roads connect to local roads so for this layout i did not connect a single local road to the arterial six lane roads so those those collector roads are specifically for our smaller local roads to go on and as long as you keep that hierarchy and are aware of how frequently you have intersections this just as kind of closing notes for the whole thing the more the heavier the road is with traffic the less intersections it should have so let's let's kind of count it up here our highway has one intersection and it's an interchange because we want it to to flow pretty much freely to get into our into our local road system so there's one highway intersection our arterial system has maybe a handful so maybe we'll say 10 to 20 intersections something like that you can you can count them up if you want screenshot this let me know in the comments how many it's it's going to be a bunch it's going to be way more than one but then our collector and local roads have dozens dozens dozens you know each of these many intersections so the smaller the road is the more access it can have so every intersection is accessed the larger the road the less access it should have that's all part of road hierarchy there's there's people that study this for a living they're called you know city planners or maybe there's a more concise person who does it but yeah that's generally what you want you want your largest roads to break down into slightly smaller roads to break down into the smallest roads and then when they want to leave their house let's say the the chestnut residents here they want to get back on the highway they go to their bigger road which connects to the even bigger road and then they can make two right-hand turns and boom they're on the highway so this eliminates through traffic going through neighborhoods this eliminates traffic build up in the larger intersections as well and to avoid an intersection you can use a roundabout if you want it's not always a perfect solution but i'd recommend using it on occasion just to see what happens bonus points bonus points ready the the bonus round if you can take this would this would be a bit more time consuming i'd recommend doing this in your city though either bike lanes or or paths if you take paths and connect them to to your uh to your arterial roads something like that so that people don't have to walk or bike all the way around to get where they're going double triple quadruple bonus points for that people will walk if you give them a short connection to go somewhere they will totally walk it like 100 of the time people will go by foot and we really want them to do that in our in our cities um so double bonus points for bike lanes uh but bonus points for walkability if you can get people to to cut these corners that'll increase the range that they can walk and they won't even go to their car and it'll further alleviate the uh the traffic issue that you might be seeing in your city boom there you go um also this this will hold up very very well with transit so take take transit into account maybe this would deserve uh you know maybe this whole bottom area would deserve a tram that cuts through the roundabout and goes down here and goes past the lake and up through the neighborhoods maybe this has a tram and maybe that tram is connected to a metro and that metro goes goes uptown to this area where maybe this is where the tall buildings are near the train station that would have you know there's all kinds of ways you can approach this i'm just theorizing but if you can get people out of their cars and into uh onto their feet walking or biking or on the bus or on the tram or on the monorail or on the metro any of those options are really really good and this will actually solve your traffic problems like nine times out of ten just follow road hierarchy make sure you have a really solid low road layout picked out and everything will go smoothly and if it doesn't feel free to uh to join me on twitch and ask me in chat you know feel free to upload a picture to our discord if you have like a specific city that you're working on and it's not working out for you feel free to upload that to discord and just show me what you've got going on and let me know if you have questions or if this works for you if it doesn't work for you this is like i said there's a science to this road hierarchy and transit and moving people around thank you for listening to me really appreciate it let me know the your feedback in the comments as well and i will absolutely see you in the next stream or the next video

Channel: YUMBLtv

Views: 173,648

Keywords: cities skylines, road, layout, traffic fix, road hierarchy, interchange, arterial, transit, walkabikity, city beautiful, simulation, building, intersection

Id: q5w8pKxkkqI

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020